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Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
Eugene H. Peterson -
Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.
Eugene H. Peterson
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It's essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory. Art is the primary way in which this happens. It's the primary way in which we become what we see or hear.
Eugene H. Peterson -
Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.
Eugene H. Peterson -
Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.
Eugene H. Peterson -
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.
Eugene H. Peterson -
The life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which Gods grace and love are expereinced.
Eugene H. Peterson -
The moment the organic unity of belief and behaviour is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created.
Eugene H. Peterson
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You're here to be LIGHT... Shine! Be generous with your lives.
Eugene H. Peterson -
Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
Eugene H. Peterson -
The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, 'Let us worship God.' If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor.
Eugene H. Peterson -
If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
Eugene H. Peterson -
My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.
Eugene H. Peterson -
Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . It is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality . . . a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.
Eugene H. Peterson -
Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God's conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn't get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests.
Eugene H. Peterson -
That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.
Eugene H. Peterson -
You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.
Eugene H. Peterson -
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment.
Eugene H. Peterson -
I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.
Eugene H. Peterson
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We've all met a certain type of spiritual person. She's a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She's not a selfish person. But she's always at the center of everything she's doing.
Eugene H. Peterson -
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.
Eugene H. Peterson -
The Spirit works through community. Somebody will have a stupid, screwy idea. That's okay. The point of having creeds and confessions and traditions is to keep us in touch with the obvious errors.
Eugene H. Peterson -
I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.
Eugene H. Peterson